Mondo Armand Duplantis keeps breaking his pole vault world record by a single centimetre, but why?

Australia Broadcast Center

5 hours ago

Armand Duplantis, the Swedish pole vault king, may have the most apt nickname in all sport.
The 25-year-old American-born athlete was nicknamed "Mondo" at a young age by a family friend.
Mondo, for those who don't know, means "world" in Italian. I told you it was appropriate.
In Sweden this week, for the 12th time in his career since February 2020, Duplantis has raised the bar on the pole vault world record, vaulting to 6.28m.
For breaking the world record in an official World Athletics event, Duplantis can expect to pocket anything between $US50,000 ($76,000) and $US100,000 ($152,000) from the governing body each time — something that certainly adds up.
It's not bad work if you can get it and, for Duplantis, getting the chance to break the world record is work that he can seemingly get very, very regularly.
And there's no telling how far he can go, either.
On each occasion Duplantis has broken the world record, he has raised the bar by just a single centimetre.
Duplantis is, without question, an athlete of extraordinary ability.
Nobody who saw his magical Olympic gold medal in Paris, where he (again) broke the world record by a single centimetre, can be in any doubt of how special he is.
And it is that combination of his extraordinary talent, his chosen event's near-unique way of setting concrete targets in competition and, ironically, a lack of competition from his rivals, that allows him to continually raise the bar at such gradual increments.
Pole vaulters, as well as high jumpers, can literally set the bar at what height they want to clear.
The same cannot be said of long jumpers, throwers or runners.
The high jumpers' lot is to compete largely against their own ability to clear the bar.
The other defining aspect of the sport is that a pole vaulter is not done until they knock the bar down three times in succession.
That means, in theory, they can send the bar up to increasingly dizzying heights for as long as they can.
Let's take the Stockholm Diamond League meet as an example.
In Stockholm, officials set the bar at an initial height of 5.45 metres, which six of the nine men in the field attempted and cleared.
The other three, including Duplantis, did not attempt at that height, opting instead to come in at the next height, which was set at 5.60m.
From that point on, the bar was raised by 10cm at a time, with two men failing to clear 5.70m, three men failing at 5.80m and two more failing to clear 5.90m, leaving just Duplantis and Australian Kurtis Marschall in the competition.
Duplantis cleared 6.00m at the first attempt, while Marschall failed three times, knocking him out of the competition.
However, Duplantis was not done, saying afterwards that "one of my biggest goals and dreams, [was] to set a world record here at Stadion."
"I really wanted to do it, I had my whole family here, from both sides.
"My grandma, she wanted me to promise yesterday that I would break the world record today — so I had a lot of pressure on me to do that in front of her."
So Duplantis told officials to raise the bar to 6.28m, 1cm higher than his previous world record, which he then cleared.
That 38cm winning margin is not that unusual for Duplantis.
He won the Olympic Games in Paris by a full 30cm from American Sam Kendricks.
Not in the slightest.
Ukrainian/Soviet vaulter Sergey Bubka made breaking his own world record an art throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.
Between 1984 and 1994, Bubka broke the world record a whopping 17 times outdoors, 10 times by just a single centimetre, raising the bar from 5.85m to 6.14m.
He also broke the world indoor record 18 times in that same period, and on only three of those occasions did he break it by more than a single centimetre.
So dominant was Bubka that no sponsors were willing to cough up world record bonuses, so Nike incentivised him to the tune of a reported $US100,000-per-record to keep reaching his ever-increasing heights.
As it happens, Duplantis has broken the indoor record six times since 2020, but his latest feat saw him blast past his previous mark by a whopping 5cm.
It was a similar story in women's pole vault, where Russian Yelena Isinbayeva set 17 world records between 2003 and 2009, with compatriot Svetlana Feofanova taking it off her twice in that time as well.
Despite the world record being broken 19 times in that six-year period, the bar was only raised by 24cm.
There are fewer equivalents in high jump, although two-time Olympic champion Romanian Iolanda Balaș broke the women's mark 14 times in the pre-Fosbury Flop era between 1957 and 1961, including 12 times in a row.
At the Stade de France during the 2024 Olympic Games, the 60,000 spectators were all, understandably transfixed by Duplantis.
Already certain of gold — his second Olympic title — the Swede was hell-bent on continuing to raise the bar.
Such is his talent that the Swede seemed to toy with supporters as he attempted 6.25m, the whole stadium clapping in unison before and during his acceleration down the runway before groaning as the bar was knocked down.
His breaking of the record seemed inevitable.
The two failures could even have been part of the script, this generational talent toying with the supporters' emotions before that one moment of euphoric release when he scaled history and vaulted into immortality.
It was his brilliance that was the only thing standing between a magic Games moment and another bland, forgettable contest.
There has, since his retirement, been a suggestion that Bubka never truly achieved his full potential as a vaulter, an almost absurd anachronism for a man who so dominated his field.
But the critics would argue that Bubka was the definition of a man just coasting, doing the bare minimum to achieve his payday and then moving on — never pushing himself beyond what was necessary.
Yes, until that point he was the greatest the world had ever seen, a man whose power and technique in using his equipment vaulted him to heights previously unheard of in the sport.
But had he been pushed by a rival, would he have soared even higher?
Perhaps we'll feel the same about Duplantis in the future.
Every time the Swede has broken the world record he has been streets above the competition — an average of 40cm above in fact.
Duplantis has essentially only been competing against himself for close to five years.
Since 2020, Duplantis has competed in 93 events. He only failed to win four of them and has not lost since 2023.
With next-to-no jeopardy in the overall result, Duplantis's never-ending quest to reach for the stars is arguably all that is keeping people interested.